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WiFi

This is kinda a weird post but anyway....

Just this past day, I went to my aunt/uncle/cousins house. They live in a development, and when I booted up my laptop, I noticed I was connected to a wireless network that WASN'T theirs - which was probably someones across the street or their next-door neighboor. The network didn't require me to have an encryption dealie, so Windows just automatically signed onto it. I couldn't help but noticing that they had a cable connection. So I hopped on and looked in the Network Neighborhood for any obvious NetBios shares on winblows computers. I didn't find any, so i pinged all the IPs in the 192.168.1.x range and it came up with 3 responding IPs, but I couldn't resolve the host names. So I figured they had either A) Macs/Linux computers or B) had firewalls up.

However, I was wondering if this was perfectly legal. I mean, I didn't do anything bad (ie delete anything). Since it wasn't my service and I didn't get premission, i thought that that made my actions against the law. However, to counteract that thought, why did England have wifi networks that anyone could use? I'm extremly confused on this matter, and I'm not sure if I broke the law. If you can, please give me the details on this law? Any help is appreciated!

Re:WiFi

I can't say for sure in England, but in the US you'd be boarderline theft of services which is a federal offense. With a good lawyer and a judge who knows his/her ass from a hole in the ground you'd probably be okay.

This is assuming you were caught in the first place and given the situation it doesn't seem likely you would be.